once a blueshirt

“I haven’t stopped the puck this well in years,” a 29-year-old John Davidson was saying in the fall of 1982 as he prepared to for his return to the New York Rangers’ crease after months of injury. “It’s a combination of hard work and experience. Starting off again is kind of new to me, and it feels good. It feels good to get out with the guys and contribute.” Davidson lost his first start of the season 3-2 to the New Jersey Devils, but five days later he helped the Rangers beat the Philadelphia Flyers by a score of 5-2 at Madison Square Garden. “The Flyers are a back-alley team,” he enthused after that one. “They come to play the game and work hard. This was a good, old-fashioned, hard-fought, knee-crawling hockey game. Whether you play in Philadelphia or here, you know you’re going to be in a battle and you look forward to it — you look forward to just going to war … and it was a war tonight.”

It also happened to be the last game of Davidson’s 10-year NHL career.

A few days after the Flyers’ game, at practice, Rangers’ assistant coach Walt Tkaczuk came in on a breakaway, deked, and — Davidson felt his back go. “When it went, it went,” he said later. “I felt a kind of jolt, like an electric shock.” Disc surgery ended his season before October was out, and though he focussed on making a return to the ice, by the summer of 1983 he was ready to call it quits. For all the trouble his back had given him, it took a knee to force him out, finally — the left one. “It’s full of arthritis and calcium,” he said. “I’m 30 years old and I guess my knee is 45 or 50.”

Davidson went into broadcasting and then, in 2006, hockey management. After six years as president of the St. Louis Blues, he took the helm of the Columbus Blue Jackets, a job he kept until he resigned last week. Now 66, Davidson made his return to the Rangers as the team’s new president. “New York’s special. There’s only one New York,” is what he told reporters who gathered today at MSG. “Once you figure it out, and it gets in your blood, it’s there forever. It’s a special place to win and that’s what we plan on doing.’’

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From Greystone Books. Available in bookstores in Canada and the United States. 2014 Hockey Book of the Year, as per www.hockeybookreviews.com. "Funny, smart, unlike any hockey book I've read," Dave Bidini has said; "Joycean," Charles Foran called it. "It’s rare to find a book that makes me proud to be Canadian," is what Michael Winter wrote: "A funny, myth-busting, life-loving read."

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poem

Thankful that I never
played against
Wayne Gretzky
in an NHL playoff series;
I probably would have had to break his hand.

I would not have wanted to injure Gretzky, mind you;
I loved the guy.
I never touched him on the ice
in a regular season game.
I had too much respect
for how he played
and how he carried himself.

But I can say without question
I would have tried to hurt him
if we had been matched up
in the playoffs.
In my mind,
there are no friends
in a playoff series

I’m not talking about
elbowing someone in the head
or going after someone’s knees.
I’m talking about a strategic slash.
To me, slashing someone’s hand or breaking someone’s fingers was nothing.
It was part of the game.

Broken hands heal.
Fingers heal.
The pain that comes from losing does not.